Master of Puppets liner notes

I remember the first time I heard Metallica. I found them real early on... It was shortly after their debut Kill ‘Em All was released.... a friend of mine was a college radio DJ and was sent the album and he thought It sounded like noise. I listened to It and was blown away. I traded him my copy of Accept’s Restless and Wild for it and never looked back. It was the heaviest thing I had ever heard and I had been looking for a sound like that for years…

I covered “Seek and Destroy” in the band I was in at the time... I even remember that Ride The Lightning was released the very same day I passed my road test and got my driver’s license... and I made my very first drive a trip to the local record shop to pick up the album that afternoon...

Master Of Puppets was released when myself, John Petrucci and John Myung were at Berklee. I totally remember picking up the album the day it came out and the 3 of us sat around my stereo like some sort of ritual. I dropped the needle onto the record (what the hell is that?) and we were floored with what we heard... about 50 minutes or so later we peeled our faces off the walls and realized we had just listened to the quintessential metal masterpiece.

I also remember the 3 of us being together when we heard that Cliff Burton had died, sitting in my bedroom with a case of beer listening to Orion and practically being brought to tears...

Zip forward 16 years later... 2002...

Dream Theater is playing the 2nd night of a 2 night stand in Barcelona, Spain... After an almost 2 hour 1st set of DT material and a 15 minute intermission, the lights went out and the opening chords to “Battery” began... 50 minutes later, the Spanish crowd had no idea what had hit them! The next day the word was all over the internet and our new tradition to cover a classic album whenever we did a 2 night stand in the same city had been established... but for those 50 minutes in Barcelona, the completely unsuspecting crowd had no way to see it coming... I remember looking into the crowd by the time we started “The Thing That Should Not Be” and seeing people look at each other like “Holy shit... they’re doing the whole fucking thing!!!”

People have always known DT’s obvious influences to be bands like Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, etc... but it was always just as important for us to incorporate the BALLS AND CHUNK of the metal bands we grew up with. And those first few Metallica albums were a big part of our early days. Covering this classic album was surely a big inspiration for us to write and record a relentlessly uncompromising classic metal album of our own and this is where Train Of Thought surely stemmed from...

Enjoy!

Metal Up Your Ass,